Prof. Lee Anne Bell receives award for her film “40 Years Later: Now Can We Talk?”

Prof. Lee Anne Bell, the Barbara Silver Horowitz Director of Education at Barnard, is the first-ever recipient of the 2014 University of South Carolina Museum of Education’s Charles and Margaret Witten Award for Distinguished Documentary Film for the documentary she produced with filmmaker Markie Hancock, 40 Years Later: Now Can We Talk?

40 Years Later explores the impact of racial integration in the Mississippi Delta through dialogue with black and white alumni from the Class of 1969 as they recall and comment on memories from that time. The film provides a contemporary way to study the impact that desegregation had on communities, and to reflect on progress made since that era.

The Charles and Margaret Witten Award seeks to generate interest in and encourage the making of documentary films in education. The distinction is granted by USC’s Museum of Education, which seeks to preserve, transmit, and expand the values and believes that define education in the American southeast and the nation as a whole.

Prof. Bell also recently presented the film to the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Education (NCORE). An annual conference presented by the Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies, NCORE aims to address the resurgence of racist incidents in higher education. Since its inception, the conference has evolved into a vital national resource for institutions of higher education, providing an annual forum representing campuses across the United States.

A member of Barnard’s faculty since 2002, Prof. Bell’s teaching specialties include urban education, social justice education, and teaching through storytelling and the arts. Her scholarly work focuses on race, gender and class and how they impact equity and access in education.